


no bold villain

by arbitrarily



Category: Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>In want of a decent burial: shoulda got killed in spring.</i> True Grit!AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	no bold villain

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty much what it says on the tin: AU based on _True Grit_ , with Mel seeking a gunslinger to help avenge her father's death.

 

 

He wakes to the girl.  
  
She stands over him, her hair bound in twin plaits on either side her drawn face. She’s a pale thing, all etched cheekbones and bitter mouth, and she’s eyeing him like she’s got half a mind to reach for the half-filled basin next to his cot to wake him further still.  
  
“Yes?” he asks in greeting. He runs a hand over his chest, just to be certain he ain’t indecent, but he’s got at the very least an undershirt and his holster on him. Decent enough, he suspects.   
  
“My name is Meliara Astiar of the township Tlanth over to the northeast. They tell me they call you Shevraeth and you’re the best gunslinger in at least ten counties.” The girl raises her chin that much more. “What you have to say for?”  
  
Shevraeth blinks up at her. “Reckon my pride compels me to agree with you.”  
  
“You a drunkard?” she asks real sharp-like, the way them nuns over in that Catholic parish down in New Orleans used to look at him when he was a boy traveling ‘long with his pop. The girl’s nose scrunches up, same as them nuns come to think, and she glances quickly ‘round at her surroundings, her expression one of great and grand disapproval.  
  
“I am not,” he says, but he says the words slow, draws them out tight with mockery and perhaps just a touch of last night’s drink. The girl, this Meliara Astiar of Tlanth township -- a mouthful for a slip of a thing, and if Shevraeth was a different man he thinks he’d have conjured up quite the different meaning of the term mouthful as pertains to her -- looks at him as though she doesn’t believe him an ounce. Smart little bit, he thinks with a shadow of a smirk.  
  
“Mister Shevraeth, I got a proposition for you.” If he’s got anything going for him, short of being a pretty decent shot with a pretty decent reputation for being a fearsome son of a bitch, it’s that he can keep his features in order, even at the most surprising turn of events. This though, this girl, more rat than female, telling him she’s got a proposition for him -- he can’t help the twitch that reaches his pursed lips.   
  
“A coward by the name John Galdran has gone and shot my father. I come down here to convey my father and his possessions back to my brother waiting in Tlanth. But I come for another reason still, Mister Shevraeath, and that reason is vengeance.” She pauses and Shevraeth wonders if she practiced this speech in the mirror this morning at the inn just ‘cross the way. He’s real sure she did, practiced while she did her hair up in those twin plaits. “I can pay,” she says. “I’m good for it. This would not be either an act of charity nor mere chivalry, Mister Shevraeth.”  
  
His smirk grows to a full bloom, and against his better judgment he offers her his hand to shake. He does not, mind you, correct her regarding his given name.  
  
That, he thinks, would be mighty uncharitable of him.

 

 

 

(He wakes to the girl. Later.   
  
Later he wakes to the girl, later when she’s gone and got her own hands dirty with a man’s blood and a man’s flesh. Her hands will smear with different men:  
  
the first, John Galdran.   
  
Shevraeth will make her take that final shot. He'll watch the way her whole body goes rigid in the dry sunlight, the night’s snowfall packed down into the dirt. Everything gray. Everything gray but the girl.  
  
 Takes her two shots to get it right.   
  
The second man, himself. His flesh.  
  
He’ll have got blood in his eyes for his efforts and his head will hurt something fierce, and that girl -- she’ll have got that same pinched mouth, same glowering expression, and there won’t be a kindly bit to be found in her.  
  
He’ll know then. He’ll know that for certain; he will have looked good and hard, deep and searching.  
  
He will have been inside her.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
But first:  
  
Over a fire he peels an apple with the blade of his knife. The skin comes off all in one piece.  
  
“How you do that so neat?” the girl asks him. She sits with her legs crossed and the flames make shadows jump across her face, casting her equal parts cynical and naive. In the same breath as her first question, she fires another, ‘nother after that:  
  
“Where you folks come down from, huh, Mister Shevraeth? Where you get that reputation, and where you get to be so good a shot? You hear about good shots all over this part of the country, but always seems to be it’s your name getting top billing and your name everyone wants to talk about and I gotta say, I ain’t seen you fire that pistol once since we set out, which has got me wondering in two parts: firstly, whether you got any aim at all to speak of or if what I can call aim you call luck, or secondly, if you a smarter man than I gave you credit for, back there at your little shed hideaway, stinkin’ like an animal and of sin, and you’ve gone and cultivated yourself quite the unearned reputation and been reaping that reward ever since.”  
  
He puts his knife down when she pauses and his teeth bite into the flesh of the apple noisily.   
  
“My name ain’t Mister Shevraeth for starters, girl.”  
  
His response seems to catch her off guard. She goes all still then cocks her head to the left, like a mutt he once had who heard things no man could reckon and settle with.  
  
“You’re not Shevraeth, the gunslinger of considerable renown of at least ten counties?” she asks. He can feel her temper, sure as the fire’s heat, and he permits a smile at that.  
  
“Did I say that?”  
  
“Don’t much know what it is you are saying, Mister -- ” she stops herself. “What’s your name then? Your given name?”  
  
“Vidanric Renselaus,” he drawls. There’s no hint of recognition to the girl’s face, and he’s not surprised. Not many use his Christian name, and he’s glad for it. “Shevraeth,” he says, “was the name of my father’s homestead a ways out, down past the bend. Place is gone now, and it passes memory how any of them all came to call me that. ‘magine it was easier to muster than Vidanric Renselaus when you’re beating a quick retreat.”  
  
“Where’s your father now?” she asks. If he was ever gonna go and call this girl (Mel, as he’s taken to refer to her person in the quiet of his own mind) demure he thinks this would be that moment.   
  
“Much like your daddy,” he says. “Took a bullet so we dug him a grave.”  
  
“What you do to the man that shot him?”  
  
“I earned myself a reputation,” he says, and the girl -- Mel -- nods in affirmation.

 

 

 

_fin._


End file.
